


Flights of Angels

by methylviolet10b



Series: Now cracks a noble heart [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Additional Scene, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Death Compliant, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Not my usual playground, Not really a fix-it but it fixes something for me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:40:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22723345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/methylviolet10b/pseuds/methylviolet10b
Summary: It wasn't the words that stole Pepper's breath. A missing scene from the funeral.
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Series: Now cracks a noble heart [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1634023
Comments: 7
Kudos: 18





	Flights of Angels

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Yeah, so this isn't my usual playground by a long shot, but I've been watching this story evolve since the original Iron Man, and there were some things at the end of Avengers: Endgame that really bothered me. I jotted this and its companion piece down and it's been sitting there ever since, so I figured I'd go ahead and post. Not mine, yadda yadda, and I haven't seen all the movies or related tie-in media/TV shows, so may not be entirely canon-compliant. Seriously, your mileage may vary here.

“I’m very sorry for your loss.”

It wasn’t the words that stole Pepper’s breath. She’d been hearing variations of them for days now, ever since Tony… since Tony.

Everyone was sorry. Almost everyone who’d said something like that to her actually meant it, at least to some degree (in General Ross’ case, a very small degree). They were sorry.

They were also, to a person, surprised. Shocked. Disbelieving.

Some of their surprise she understood right down to her bones. Who could believe that Tony, that someone so alive, so much of a presence, who (love him or hate him, and there were people here who fell on both sides of that divide) took up so much _room_ in the world, in your life – that he could be gone?

She could forgive that.

What she couldn’t forgive – what scratched and clawed at the surface of her grief until she wanted to scream in rage – was the disbelieving surprise she heard in every single one of those condolences about Tony’s sacrifice. That he had made the choice that he did. That everyone was so surprised he had died to save them.

No one believed it. Everyone was surprised. Well, everyone here. Natasha wasn’t here to be surprised. Maybe she, of all people, wouldn’t have been; but even if she had been surprised, she’d never have let Pepper see it. She’d be the one person Pepper would have been left wondering about, could have convinced herself that Tasha too had known Tony was capable of that, or let her think so. Remembering Tasha’s loss made Pepper ache, grief upon grief.

Nick Fury, the puppet master, who supposedly knew everything about everyone, but had never known Tony well enough to predict this.

The Avengers, all those who were left, the new ones and the ones who’d known Tony from the beginning. Who’d fought by his side. Who’d seen him ride a _fucking nuclear missile_ into a gaping hole in the space/time continuum. Steve – well, that wasn’t a surprise, his trust issues with Tony started the day they met, but the rest of them? How could they not know?

Bruce, who’d been more than a teammate; who’d been a friend and colleague even when Tony was no longer part of the team. The man Tony had trusted to try and talk to about what had happened after New York, after Extremis, when she herself had been too busy trying to cope with her own trauma.

Rhodey, who’d been his friend since MIT, long before Pepper had met Tony. Who had learned to walk again, Tony by his side.

Even Happy, who’d worked for Tony at his worst, and who had been with him – with them – to see all of Tony’s many sides. Who had lived with them, seen Tony with her, with Peter, with Morgan.

Surprised by his sacrifice, every single damned one of them. Everyone was surprised, except her. And, evidently, except the man who stood in front of her in a very expensive custom black suit that nonetheless seemed ever-so-slightly wrong on him, as if it was made for a different version of that man.

Mystic robes suited him much better.

Pepper knew how to read people. She’d always been good at it, even as a child. The last decade and change had given her plenty of opportunity and need to hone her skills on everyone from captains of industry to government officials to randomly-powered individuals, some of them actual aliens. She’d learned to read them all. She had a particular facility for seeing the nuances in very intelligent men who were not particularly good with their own emotions, especially in uncomfortable situations.

So she saw his sadness, and his remorse, and the touch of guilt, along with the awkward need to try and express condolences. She saw his desire to offer her support, his uncertainty about his ability to do so, his wish that things could be different for her, for Morgan. 

There wasn’t a single iota of surprise in him. The amount of gratitude she felt for that clogged her throat and threatened to loose the tears she’d been holding back all day through sheer force of will.

“Thank you, Doctor Strange,” she said to the only other person who was utterly unsurprised. Who when it came right down to it, had absolutely, unconditionally believed in Tony Stark. Believed in him enough to let himself be turned to dust for five years, and possibly forever, to give Tony the chance to save them all.

Of course it probably helped to have a magical Time Stone and millions of futures to show you what Tony was truly capable of. Pepper had never had that particular advantage. She’d just loved him enough to do her best to understand him, to see all of Tony, even the parts he successfully hid from everyone else.

Doctor Strange nodded, then shifted uncomfortably, one hand rising as if to grasp a pendant that wasn’t there – or at least not there that she could see. Pepper knew better than to assume that just because she couldn’t see something, it wasn’t actually there, not with a man called the Sorcerer Supreme.

“I don’t know if it will help you to know this,” he said, that deep voice of his sounding uncharacteristically unsure compared to the only other times she’d heard it. “It can’t change your loss. But no one else could have done what Tony did.”

She had to smother an urge to laugh. “He was one of a kind.”

It didn’t help at all, not in the way he probably intended. But it reminded her yet again of what she’d come to know, and what she’d always known.

To marry a man of iron, she’d had to be certain that she herself was a woman of adamant and steel.

It was part of what had kept them apart for so long, despite her love for him, and his for her. (Well, that, and the kidnappings, and the attacks, and their mutual near-death experiences, and their differing but equally difficult cases of PTSD, and the very real need for time and therapy and recovery to cope with it all.) For she’d known from the first time she’d seen the bullet-marks on his armor that she’d be the one left alone, to live on when he was gone. 

Tony had come back from Afghanistan determined to be a hero. It didn’t take long for Pepper to figure out what that really meant.

Like many people of their age, Tony’s earliest idea of a hero had been Steve Rogers. Unlike most others, he’d had stories told by his father as well as the legend found in popular culture to fuel his hero-worship. Captain America, the man who’d died saving New York (and coincidentally, Howard Stark) from annihilation.

Tony’s definition of a hero was cemented by Yinsen, who’d suffered alongside him. Who’d done his best to keep Tony alive and safe. Who had died to help free Tony from that cave.

Heroism and death had always been inextricably intertwined in Tony’s mind, in the alpha and omega of his personal examples. She remembered the first time Tony had nearly died trying to save others, the echo of their conversation haunting her mind.

_“Time to push the button, Pepper.”_

_“But you’ll die!_

_“Push it!”_

For all his genius and all his imagination, and despite all the myriad ways he’d adapted and coped, Tony had never been able to entirely separate the two ideas, being a hero and dying a hero, not fully. Not even when Steve Rogers came back from the dead, miraculously defrosted and resurrected into the 21st century, a living, breathing man with strengths and his flaws, and not a one-dimensional paper icon.

No, they’d never been entirely easy with one another, Tony and Steve. For all his cynicism, Pepper recognized that a little part of Tony had never quite gotten over his disappointment that his childhood hero was only human after all. Steve’s initial, bitter assessment of Tony (“You’re not the guy to cut the wire and let the other guy crawl over you,”) had hurt Tony deeply. Not that he’d admitted as much to her, not for years. JARVIS had been the one to share the recording of that ugly exchange with her soon after it had happened, trying to help her understand the dynamics of what was going on between Tony and Steve. But she’d seen the hurt in Tony’s eyes all the same when he looked at Steve. Seen it in the way Tony had tried to prove, again and again, that he _was_ trustworthy, that he _was_ dependable. That he was, in fact, that guy.

Tony had never been able to forget that hurt, that judgment, even when he was trying his hardest to forgive it.

Then again, in her opinion Steve had never quite been able to forgive Tony for not being Howard, the friend he remembered, the man that Tony resembled so closely in so many ways (no matter how hard Tony had tried to rebel against that). Steve had certainly never been able to forget it. Tony’s very existence was a constant bit of salt in the gaping wounds left by being a man out of time.

Doctor Strange grimaced, drawing Pepper’s wandering thoughts back to him. “That’s not quite what I meant. I mean…” He stopped, clearly searching for words.

“Yes,” she said, agreeing with that struggling silence more than Doctor Strange could know. Tony was… well, beyond words was one way of summarizing it. “I know what you meant.”

Even with death an integral part of his definition of heroism, Tony had been determined to live. He wasn’t actively suicidal, even when he’d been dying and doing his level best to piss off everyone on the planet. Death walked beside him, he never forgot that, but he never stopped fighting it, either. He was a survivor. He was, in a very real sense, too much of an arrogant asshole to do anything but metaphorically raise both middle fingers to the inevitable outcome of being a hero. And in the last five years, after the Snap, he’d been even more committed to living every moment, even while continuing to try and save the world.

He’d given up on the Avengers, or at least on being an Avenger; the rift between himself and Steve was too great, the mutual loss of faith too much to bear. He’d turned instead to using his technology to try and save the world in a different way, fill in some of the holes left behind. Not the individual people, but the farming, manufacturing, distribution networks, energy production, and resource management problems caused by losing half the population. At the same time, he’d turned his mind towards attempting to fix the environmental damage and other problems caused by the demands of the original population size in the first place.

He hadn’t been able to solve them all. No one man could, not even Tony. Not even she and Tony working together, although they’d done their best. The half of the world suddenly returned wouldn’t find the world the same as they had left it. But they wouldn’t starve, either. Wouldn’t overburden a system scaled down to half the population, because it hadn’t been; it had been improved and expanded, with capacity for many times more people than there had been before Thanos. It had been one of their expressions of hope, jointly decided on, jointly worked towards: that come what may, even the miracle of undoing what Thanos had done, the planet would be better off than it had been before the Snap happened.

Tony hadn’t given up being Iron Man during those years, still putting on the suit when needed. But it was no longer his primary focus.

It was part of the reason she’d finally given in and put on a suit of her own. Practiced in it, flown missions in it, learned to be his partner in that as in all else.

“There are others as brave as he was,” she said softly, giving Doctor Strange some of the words he was still visibly searching for. The words she had given herself, deep in the night, alone. “There are a few people as inventive, as intelligent, similar in genius. There are even a _very_ few who are as stubborn and determined as he could be.” She sighed and acknowledged the truth she and Tony had speculated about a few times in the five years they’d had, wondering about what had happened, why things had turned out the way they had. “But there was only one man on that battlefield who was all of those things. The right place, the right technology, the right personality, the right time.” The right mindset, she did not say, but thought all the same. “The one chance.”

“…Yes.” Just the one word in acknowledgement. Doctor Strange lowered his eyes briefly before bringing them back to meet her own.

She saw regret. She saw sympathy. And she saw his expectation that she would lash out at him. If she slapped him, he wouldn’t stop her, and he wouldn’t be surprised, and he wouldn’t even think she was wrong for doing so. He was making himself a target and outlet for her grief and pain, because some part of him felt responsible for it, and it was all he could do.

 _“God, Strange was an arrogant asshole,”_ she remembered Tony saying. Could hear his voice, see his face, the wry grin, the reluctant admiration, the gratitude and the doubt and the pain. _“And I should know; takes one to know one. But he saved my life, Pep. He saved the kid more than once in that last fight. He wanted to save everyone. Told me he would, even if he had to sacrifice others to do it. He was ready to do that, and yet in the end he gave Thanos the stone. He died. Why? What did he see?”_

Tony couldn’t help wondering about it. They’d talked about it many times. Neither one of them had come right out and said it, but Tony was a genius, and Pepper was hardly stupid. It was impossible not to think that Strange had done what he’d done because Tony was going to be needed somehow. That he would do something, build something, find something that would make sense of Strange’s choice.

And he had. Now they all knew.

She couldn’t thank him for it. But she couldn’t blame him, either, because Tony was who he was. And she wouldn’t lash out at him, no matter how much he expected her to, or how much he thought he might deserve it.

She reached out and took one of his hands in both her own and squeezed it gently.

A startled heartbeat later, she saw understanding and gratitude flash across his lean features. He reached out, covered their joined hands with his remaining one, and squeezed back ever so lightly.

The brief moment ended as a minor commotion reached their ears from out on the lawn. It didn’t sound particularly alarming to Pepper, but Doctor Strange stiffened as if he’d heard an alarm bell. “Excuse me,” he murmured before turning away and striding out the door so quickly, Pepper could almost see the swirl of that funny cloak, even though he was still only wearing the black suit.

“The Pym particle activation went as they planned, but Captain Rogers has not returned as scheduled, boss,” Friday murmured in her ear. A constant presence, always there for her, just as JARVIS had been for Tony.

Tony had never stopped missing JARVIS, and Vision after him.

She was never going to stop missing Tony. She was never going to stop looking for him, listening for his voice, expecting to feel his arms go around her. She was going to spend the rest of her life being haunted by the goddamned ghost of Tony Stark.

She’d known that going in, guessed how much it was going to hurt. She’d been wrong. It hurt far more than she’d ever imagined.

But she would go on nonetheless. She would continue the work they’d started. She’d run Stark Industries in this repopulated, Tony-less world. She would put on her suit of armor, metaphorically and literally. She would fly again.

Someone had to.

And when their daughter grew old enough, grew up, if she chose to become a hero – her amazing child, already so bright, so very like Tony, but like her, too – she would know.

She’d know heroes could die. There was no escaping that. But if Pepper had anything to say about it – and she did – Morgan would grow up knowing that heroes could live, too.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted February 14, 2020.


End file.
